George wrote, directed, produced, animated, edited, and scored Boy in the BOX himself, in 2004, without a studio between him and the result. He filed it under a genre of his own naming, “Psycho-Fiction” — a boy locked in a domestic room with a family whose heads have been replaced by household objects, lightbulbs and flowerpots among them, played as an absurdist allegory for isolation and family abuse rather than a straight creature feature. The effects work is his usual melting-skin body horror, but without a producer’s notes on what a mainstream release could carry.
The film mixes live performance with stop-motion and green-screen compositing, and the score — avant-garde electronic — is his own, a direct line back to his time fronting the punk band The Mad. It is most widely seen today as a bonus feature tucked onto Arrow Video’s Blu-ray release of Society.
It landed in the mid-2000s as George moved away from a Hollywood makeup-effects industry that was giving way to CGI and toward gallery installations and self-funded short work. Here he could combine his SVA art training, music and effects craft in one finished film.